From: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:50:29 GMT Subject: Re: git pack/unpack over bittorrent - works! Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <5B5470E5-57E6-48D2-981B-CE77FA43546F@mit.edu> On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Theodore Tso wrote: > such as ebook DRM liberation scripts (the kind which today > are typically distributed via pastebin's :-), my guess is that > zipping up a git repository and dropping it on a standard > bittorrent server run by the Swedish Pirate party is going to > be much more effective.   :-) :) the legality or illegality isn't interesting - or is a... red herring, being one of the unfortunate anarchistic-word-associations with the concept of "file sharing". the robustness and convenience aspects - to developers not users - is where it gets reaaally interesting. i do not know of a single free software development tool - not a single one - which is peer-to-peer distributed. just... none. what does that say?? and we have people bitching about how great but non-free skype is. there seems to be a complete lack of understanding of the benefits of peer-to-peer infrastructure in the free software community as a whole, and a complete lack of interest in the benefits, too - perhaps for reasons no more complex than the tools don't exist so it's catch-22, and the fact that the word "distributed" is _already_ associated with the likes of SMTP, DNS and "git" so everybody thinks "we're okay, jack, go play with your nice dreams of p2p networking, we're gonna write _real_ code now". ... mmmm :) l.